A PAIN IN THE...LEG If something hurts when you run, there's probably a good reason and a remedy. hate them. mean, I really hate them-as much as I hate audible chewing, people who lack spatial awareness, and corporatespeak. (Synergy! Scalable! Drill down! Ugh, please shut up) I hate them with the fire of a thousand blowtorches marinated in liquid capsaicin and poached in magma. q What are "them," you ask? q Them are shin splints, and them are the worst. q when I first began to run, it felt as though my tibialis muscle was being ripped from the bone, fiber by fiber. Guess what! It still feels like that Except now, I run more often than next-to-never, which means my tender tissues are being yanked from my skeleton at a more frequent rate. q For the uninitiated, "shin splints" is an umbrella term for the stress pains experienced in the front or inner a runner's lower leg. In case the ripping description above wasn't evocative enough, I'll try again: Imagine your shin muscle is a wet rag you're wringing out, twisting until it feels so torqued up and taut it can be wrung no more. Imagine someone using two forks to then tat your shin muscle, in much the same way one shreds a hunk of braised pig into pulled pork. T In my case, the pain is always in the front of my leg, never the side. this means I'm suffering from anterior, as to shin splints. The bul teardrop-shaped muscle that extends downward from m knee right one, most ht and stiff by the third or fourth minute of a run that I often-sometimes gets so I have to pause and use the sturdy butts of my hands to rub the pain away. On dire days, I'm able to rub away only enough agony to limp home. On the worst days, I'm too racked with the fear of shin-shredding to even go out. Needless to say, this cannot stand. Not if Attention, attention, this is big! I'm going to start increasing my endurance enough to run the Walt Disney World 5K in January. Yeah, that's right: a 5K. I'm taking on this modest goal because I enjoy succeeding more than I enjoy failing, and because the whole idea of run ning, after all, is to advance careful ly, incrementally, toward ever more ambitious plans. In fact, pushing too hard too fast is typically why those demon splints occur: Work your legs too strenuously before they're ready, and they'll scream bloody murder. But can I possibly be "pushing too hard"? My pace would embarrass a snail. I mean, for God's sake, I'm giv- ing myself six months to train for a measly 3.1-mile race. I'm not exactly shooting for the stars, here. Some thing else must be at play.